Women, feminism, and geek culture

GF classifieds: become a linkspammer

Hi everyone,

You’ve probably noticed that things have been veeeeeery quiet around here for a few months. It’s something of a life change/life crunch time for a lot of the regulars here, so it seems like a good time to bring more contributors on board!

First request for help: we’d love to have some volunteers to help out with reviving our Linkspams! It should be fairly low time commitment, and a good way to bring some juice back to the blog.

If you’re interested, read on.

Lead Linkspammer (up to 2 people)

If possible, we’d like to have one or two Lead Linkspammers (that’s lead as in Leader, not lead as in the element, unless you like the element, in which case, fine). Lead linkspammers may create linkspams themselves (see below) but by Lead what we mean is making sure that linkspams happen regularly.

A Lead Linkspammer would:

with input from the linkspam team, create a schedule for Linkspammers to put up posts

help Linkspammers out with technical difficulties if possible

recruit replacement Linkspammers when needed

A Lead Linkspammer would need:

the Linkspammer skills below

familiarity with the WordPress posting interface (you don’t need to have adminned a WordPress blog, we mean having posted to one and being able to explain how you did it to other people), including tagging, and willingness to help the Linkspammers out with their early spams

willingness to create and maintain schedules, including keeping an eye out for additional Linkspammers when need be, and ability to just make a decision about who is doing what if the team gets too “no, you take Tuesdays!” “no no, I can tell you want Tuesdays, you do Tuesdays!”

willingness to gently remind Linkspammers of their upcoming spams

We’d like it if the Lead Linkspammer(s) could commit to at least six months as a Lead, and can give at least a couple of weeks notice if they need to move on, so that their replacement can be found and work handed over.

The initial time commitment may come to a few hours a week while you get set up, but ongoing it’s probably one hour or less per week on top of compiling any linkspam posts you commit to in your schedule.

Linkspammer (up to 6 people)

A Linkspammer creates linkspam! You would:

gather together links submitted by readers (and optionally links you found yourself)

read over them at least to the point where you can write a short summary

post the links and short summaries

A Linkspammer would need:

to identify as a geek feminist or a geek feminist ally, and to generally like this blog

some editorial judgement: being able to decide if a link is worth sharing or not, and to select 6–10 links for the spam

ability to at least skim through links and summarise their content in a sentence or two, and warn for common triggers

ability to keep an eye on all the linkspams, just so that yours has new links in it

ability to put up with occasional public criticism, and apologise if you agree you made a mistake: sometimes our readers criticise linkspams, although not very often, and unless they violate the comments policy we will generally let the criticisms remain publicly visible.

We’d like it if the Linkspammer(s) could commit to at least two months (each Spammer will produce about one spam every fortnight, we hope), and can give at least a couple of weeks notice if they need to move on. The Lead Linkspammers will schedule your linkspams in: one will be due every two or three weeks.

The time commitment is probably one to two hours every time you have a linkspam due.

How to join us

Let us know in comments if you’re interested in helping out: make sure to leave an email address and state whether you could be a Lead Linkspammer, a Linkspammer, or both.

We don’t need a whole resume, but a sentence about your previous involvement in geek feminism would be good, eg “I’ve been commenting here for months” or “I write about geek feminism stuff sometimes on my blog” or etc.

Please note: we cannot pay Linkspammers (or any other contributor), you will be working as an unpaid volunteer.

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About Mary

Mary is a women in tech activist, a programmer, a writer, and a sometime computational linguist. She writes at puzzling.org. Her previous projects include co-founding the Ada Initiative and major contributions to the Geek Feminism blog. She's @me_gardiner on Twitter.

8 thoughts on “GF classifieds: become a linkspammer”

I do my own (automated) daily linkspams, and have done stuff for Who Daily on LJ. Experience tells me that linkspams tend to fall off very quickly the more effort they involve. How about setting up a shared delicious account that all your linkspammers can contribute to with a couple of clicks, and a schedule for automated posting using feedthistothat, and then having your Leads go in and check/edit the links thus garnered before the autopost goes out?

It’s possible we’ll do this. Can you (or someone) provide more details on “a couple of clicks”? Mostly:
(1) what are these couple of clicks?
(2) a lot of our major link contributors have their own Delicious or Pinboard accounts already. Do the couple of clicks include logging out and logging into the shared accounts or is there a way to avoid doing that?
(3) is it possible with Pinboard? A lot of geek feminists have left Delicious due to their loss of functionality and/or the terms of service restricting the links that can be posted?

I suppose everybody has their own preferred way of keeping track of information, links and tasks at hand, so it might be better to cater for a wider range of different of individual approaches.
If you use delicious then this could make live easier for you, but if you don’t then it’s another step in a workflow that can just delay things.
Personally I even use a number of different strategies to store links I need to do something with: bookmarking, posting something on my own blog without publishing it yet, sometimes sending myself an email so that I’ll look at that page again when I’m back at my desk, or even simply dropping a url into IRC. It also changes depending on where I am and what I work on.
Keep it simple and diverse and maybe once in a while exchange between link spammers their preferred workflows.

I noticed that my last post is still awaiting moderation and am wondering if it is because it had a link in it? Just posting this as a heads up in case it’s gone to the spam folder. Feel free to delete this one. Thanks!

It’s unrelated to this post, but I wasn’t sure where to comment. The old version of GF (the one that you had to choose to see instead of the new version) seems to have disappeared. There hasn’t been an announcement about taking it down. Was that intentional, or is there still a way to use it?

I think I commented when the change was first enacted, but I find the new version much harder to use. I very much appreciated the ability to quickly check for and read new posts that the old layout provided, so I’ve been using that the whole time.